Why Macrobiotic Healing is Effective

By Karen Bump

Macrobiotic healing is effective for several reasons. First, macrobiotics considers the whole person: a person’s current physical, emotional, and spiritual condition. Furthermore, it considers a person’s constitution, or conditions and tendencies that a person was born with. This way of viewing a person not only leads to holistic treatment, but it means that the approach, by nature, addresses the source of issues and health conditions vs. attempting to suppress symptoms. The approach promotes reversal or correction of issues -- true healing, instead of a temporary patch or prescription of a substance that could have side effects or untoward effects on other bodily systems.

Macrobiotic healing is also effective because it places the human being and each individual person in the larger context of their environment, including conditions in their home, and where it’s located, such as the type of community (e.g., city or rural) and its climactic or latitudinal zone. It considers what is needed by human beings to live in harmony with that particular environment in terms of food and other factors such as cooking methods, cooking sources, home heating sources, and even what fabrics make up bedding and clothing. Although some macrobiotic counselors may appear to focus more on one of these factors, such as food; particularly during a significant health crisis, truly everything is up for inspection.

A person’s age, sex, and type / level of physical activity are also important considerations in the macrobiotic approach, and any recommendations would take these into account.

Macrobiotic healing also considers the effects of the structure and energies of plant and animal food and the larger cycles of nature on the human being. The deep understanding of how these factors affect our organs and other bodily systems also allows for the application of remedies that can reverse or correct conditions due to not living in harmony with nature – from eating processed or manufactured foods which no longer retain the energy of the plants from which they were derived, to eating foods that, being not native to another climate, interfere with our ability to adapt to the climate in which we live.

Macrobiotics essentially strives to put a person back in balance, physically, emotionally, and spiritually, and teaches people the principles to retain that balance throughout their lifetime.